Rethinking The Middle

Middle management isn't unnecessary, but it is the easiest layer to thin out.

It was built to make sure people were doing their job properly. Hire well, and you barely need it.

There's an analogy that middle management is the meat in a hamburger. Most people like a hamburger. I love a good hamburger, with chips. A hamburger without chips is sadness on a plate, but I digress. That is where the problem lies. It's overused and lulls people into a false sense of comfort.

The bun is the essential part of the hamburger. Without it, you have a salad. The bun encapsulates the hamburger.  The top of the bun is akin to the layer of senior management, and the base is symbolic of the staff on the ground, doing the work. A hamburger isn't a hamburger without both. Everything in between, however, is negotiable, and negotiable is exactly where the cost-cutting lands. Sure, you can make the bun slightly smaller, but we aren't talking about sliders here.

Here's how the cutting actually plays out. You don't eliminate the bun. You do, however, reduce the number and size of the patties. You drop the quality of the meat. You use the lettuce sparingly, slice the tomato paper-thin, and over-manufacture the sauce until it's mostly filler. None of that touches the bun. All of it happens in the middle, because the middle is the part of the hamburger nobody has actually defined.

In 2022, when floods wiped out lettuce crops across Queensland and New South Wales, KFC didn't touch the bun. It swapped the lettuce for cabbage and kept serving hamburgers under the same name. Most customers didn't even notice until they took a bite.

That's the middle. Quietly swapped out for cheaper and easier the moment demand got tight. The bun stayed. The middle got compromised, and the business kept calling it a hamburger.

That's the real risk for anyone sitting in middle management today. It's not being cut outright. It's being quietly thinned until there's barely any substance left, while still carrying the title and the workload of something more solid.

Where It Started

Middle management didn't start as a leadership function. It started as a control function. When factories replaced small workshops during the Industrial Revolution, ownership needed a way to keep production synchronised with machines, so structured oversight of workers became standard practice. Way back in 1911, Frederick Taylor argued that output could be maximised through time studies, standardisation, and constant monitoring. That's the DNA still running through a large part of middle management roles today: not judgment, but checking. As businesses grew, this layer became powerful enough to translate decisions down and report progress up. But computerisation removed the need for managers to just gather and relay information. The function was built for an era of unreliable information and unreliable hiring. Fix the hiring, and most of the original justification disappears with it.

In Defence of the Meat

McKinsey has linked strong manager behaviour to better shareholder returns. Gallup's data has been used to call middle managers the single biggest factor in productivity. The case for the middle usually comes down to translation and coordination: managers turn strategy into action, absorb the chaos, and surface what's actually happening on the ground before it reaches the top.

But look closely at the pattern in that research. It's not the layer. It's the investment in making the 'meat' better. That's a different claim entirely.

Investing in middle management usually comes down to a cost-per-head decision. HR sets a training budget, picks a topic that sounds current, such as leadership, resilience, or communication, and rolls it out broadly because broad is cheaper and easier to justify than a targeted program. It meets an interest but rarely fills a gap. That's not development. That's attendance.

This isn't a dig at HR. Budgets get set months in advance, providers get chosen for reach rather than fit, and a workshop that appeals to a wide group is far easier to defend than a program built around one manager's weak spot. Until that changes, the money spent on the middle will keep looking like investment on a spreadsheet without functioning like investment in the role.

Now add AI and Gen Z talent who don't wait to be told what to do, and the undefined middle faces a reduced need altogether. AI is absorbing the reporting and monitoring functions the role was originally built for. Younger staff crave autonomy and are increasingly comfortable making decisions and pushing information upward themselves. The middle isn't just squeezable anymore. It's rethinkable.

Patty or Bun

If you're in middle management right now, you're the patty.

To secure and advance your career, stop behaving like one. Patty-level middle managers pass information up and instructions down. They're a relay, not a decision-maker. Go from two patties to one and the business barely notices, because they weren't adding anything a good system couldn't replace.

Becoming bun means doing three things patty-level managers don't:

Make decisions, not just recommendations. Own outcomes in your patch instead of escalating everything upward to avoid the blame.

Develop people, not just manage tasks. If your team can't function without you standing over them, you're not leading, you're supervising, and supervision is exactly what gets automated or absorbed.

Translate strategy into execution. Anyone can repeat what leadership says. Few can turn it into a plan their team can run with.

Don't get comfortable in the middle. It's the one part of the hamburger nobody has ever properly defined, and undefined is exactly what gets trimmed first.

If You're The CPO Reading This

Think back to your last round of cuts. Where did they actually land? Chances are it wasn't the executive layer nor the frontline. It was more than likely somewhere in the middle.

Now think about your last training spend in that same layer. Was it built around a defined capability gap, or was it a broadly appealing topic that looked good on a slide and satisfied a budget line?

You can't keep cutting the middle and investing in it the same vague way and expect a different result. Define what that layer is there to do and invest in that.